Gloom in the Rose Garden : Parking Garage Planned Under Exposition Park

Orlando Alayu was joyous last year when he was transferred to the Exposition Park rose garden and named senior gardener. To him, working among the 20,000 rosebushes is both the highest meditation and a public service.

“You don’t do this for money,” says Alayu, who works for the Los Angeles Recreation and Parks Department. “Being able to come to work and see a bud become a blossom before you go home at night is a reminder of the mystery of nature. And to know your work lets others share in that is incomparable.”

But in recent days, as many of the fall blossoms in the 75-year-old garden began to shatter, so too has the tranquility of Alayu and other rose lovers.

The Los Angeles Coliseum Commission approved a proposal to dig up the nationally acclaimed rose garden--one of the largest in the United States--and build a massive two-story underground parking lot on the seven-acre site. Cognizant that the plan could be a thorny one from a public relations standpoint, commissioners are emphasizing that many of the bushes will be saved by moving them while construction takes place and then replanting them on top of the parking structure.

“We’re not just going to replace the roses with concrete,” said Alex Haagen, commission vice president. “The plan calls for 1,200 parking spaces to alleviate the severe parking and safety problem at the park, but the rose garden will be more beautiful than ever.”

But Alayu and rose associations nationwide are not convinced.

“I cried when they told me,” said the soft-spoken gardener, gazing at a mass of light purple roses shimmering with early morning dew. “There are 202 varieties of roses here.”

The seven-acre sunken garden was laid out in 1911 when local farmers started holding agricultural exhibits at the park; nobody seems to know when the first roses were planted. Today, the garden, which is on state land leased to the city, is graced with gazebos, benches and a graceful fountain. More than a million people a year visit the garden, using it for picnics, weddings and quiet reflection.

It is one of the top display gardens in the country, according to the All-America Rose Selection, a growers organization that since 1940 has donated its Rose of the Year selections to the Exposition Park garden. Most are still growing.

The Coliseum Commission is seeking authority from the state to issue $75 million in tax-free bonds for this first phase of a plan that will ultimately increase parking from 5,800 spaces to 20,000 spaces for the Coliseum, Sports Arena and nearby museums. If the bonds are approved next month, construction of the rose garden parking structure and another on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, which together would create an additional 3,200 parking spaces, could begin in early 1987 and be completed by fall.

Parking has long been a serious problem in the area, with thousands of people attending events being forced to park on neighborhood streets and yards. The commission last year appointed a 62-member committee to study expansion plans at the park, including the parking problem. The group included local and state officials, planners and neighborhood representatives.

“It was our last choice because we wanted to preserve the rose garden as a historical spot, but for many technical reasons--traffic flow, convenience, space problems, we had to choose it,” explained consultant J. Todd Stoutenborough, vice president of Architects Pacifica Ltd. of Newport Beach, which came up with a conceptual plan to redo the rose garden.

Stoutenborough says he is well aware of what the garden has meant to the community. “My father used to tell me about coming here for the first Olympics (in 1932), and he used to take me here when I was a child. It has a special feeling in my heart. And through this design I hope to give something back to it.”

The parking area will be more park than structure, he said, constructed so it is open and light even though it is below ground level. The two levels will be landscaped and a walkway will lead up through the center of the area alongside a cascading fountain. “It will be preserved in a better way,” he said of the garden, which will be on the roof at ground level. “It will be a fun, safe and exciting place to go.”

Another member of the park improvement committee, Robert Harris, USC architecture dean, disagrees.

“The plan sounds terrific, but raising the garden eight feet changes all the spatial relationships. And ramps will cut across the lawn from Exposition Boulevard. It won’t be a tranquil, beautiful garden like it is now. It will be a place full of activity and cars and people coming and going . . . a different feeling altogether.” Harris says that a more logical--and less expensive--site for an underground parking lot would have been directly south of the Natural History Museum, an area largely unoccupied now. But that proposal was rejected because experts believed traffic would not flow as easily in the area and because it is a farther walk to the museums.

A final landscape design has yet to be drawn, so no one can estimate how many of the rose bushes will be saved. The plan is to dig them up, transplant them temporarily in other parks or other areas of Exposition Park and then replant them when the parking facility is completed; new bushes could also be purchased.

“I’m trying to react reasonably about this because it’s a fact of life that parking is needed,” said Maggie Oster, a spokeswoman in Indiana for the All-America Rose Selection organization. “And I know there is a spectacular garden built over a freeway in Seattle. But we would want to be assured that they will carry through with replanting them.

“In most areas of the country, they are retaining these old gardens. And recently 10 new ones have been started nationally. And now that the rose is our national flower, there is even more reason to preserve them,” she said, adding that the only display garden she knows of with more bushes is in Tyler, Tex.

Such gardens contain a living botanical history. The most recent additions to the Los Angeles garden include 1987 selections, Bonica, New Year and Sheer Bliss. The garden still has some of the first selections that the group made in the early 1940s, including the Chief, Charlotte Armstrong and Mary Margaret McBride.

Grace Seward, Pacific Southwest district director of the America Rose Society, doubts that the older roses would survive the move.

“There are roses there that you just can’t buy any more because most people want the new varieties and the growers provide only those. Many of these marvelous old roses just go out of existence if they aren’t kept in gardens such as this,” she said. “It’s a shame to lose that tradition.”

Local rose hobbyists, she noted, go to the garden every winter to collect trimmings for their own gardens. “No one told us that this was even being considered,” Seward said. “I’m sure it’s going to make a lot of people unhappy.”

To Alayu, the thought of uprooting more than 20,000 rosebushes is staggering, but he hopes that he and his crew will be asked to help in the project. (Officials say they expect outside contractors to do much of the work).

“You can’t do it by the click of your fingers. It takes tremendous time and care, and it will take maybe five years before they come out like this again,” said Alayu, who 20 years ago traded in a business administration degree for pruning shears and gloves.

He says it takes at least 20 minutes to trim, dig up and tag each bush; this transplanting must be done during the dormant period between January and April. And he estimates that one out of 10 bushes would not survive.

Meanwhile, Alayu and his six crew members continue their award-winning work--trimming, fertilizing and weeding, and watering about five rose beds each day.

“We talk to them, sing to them,” he said, walking through rows and rows of the brilliant purple, red, yellow and orange blossoms. “Roses are like people, you have to treat them right for them to survive and thrive. I am keeping my fingers crossed that the guys running the show know this.”